Who

Lahiri is an Indian-American fiction writer whose 1999 short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies made her, at age 32, the youngest author ever to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Backstory

Born in London and raised in Rhode Island by her Bengali Indian parents, Lahiri struggled for years to write professionally. She earned three master's degrees and a PhD in Renaissance Studies from Boston University, but success as a fiction writer proved more elusive than academic achievement: Her stories were constantly rejected by literary agents, publishers, and writing contest judges. Lahiri was contemplating getting a job in retail when Janklow & Nesbit's Eric Simonoff negotiated a two-book deal (in the "low five figures") with Houghton Mifflin for her story collection The Interpreter of Maladies. The book—published in paperback original with a very small print run—was showered with critical acclaim, but Lahiri was still stunned when she learned she'd won the Pulitzer. (She says she thought she was being prank-called.) Her first novel, 2003's The Namesake—which focuses, like her stories, on Desi culture—was a Times bestseller and praised by Michiko Kakutani as "a symphonic work, a debut novel that is as assured and eloquent as the work of a longtime master of the craft." A new collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was published by Knopf in April 2008, received typically glowing reviews, and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

On screen

The film version of The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair and starring Harold and Kumar's Kal Penn, arrived in theaters in 2007 to solid reviews. Lahiri herself makes a brief cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa."

AKA

Lahiri wasn't born Jhumpa; her legal name is Nilanjana Sudeshna. As she's explained, many Bengalis have two names, a "pet" name and a "public" one, but it was her pet moniker—like Gogol's, the hero of The Namesake—that happened to stick, partly because when she started school a teacher decided it was easier to pronounce. "To this day," she says, "many of my relatives think that it's both odd and inappropriate that I'm known as Jhumpa in an official, public context."

Trophy case

In addition to her Pulitzer, Interpreter won Lahiri the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New Yorker "Debut of the Year." She also won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Personal

In 2001, Lahiri wed journalist and El Diario editor Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush in Calcutta, an affair that attracted paparazzi and TV crews clamoring for a view. Lahiri and her husband have two children, and live in Fort Greene.